


if he ain't got nobody

by littleblacksubmarine



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Multi, Oral Sex, Pining, Prostitution, Unrequited Love, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-28 12:07:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20778299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littleblacksubmarine/pseuds/littleblacksubmarine
Summary: All's fair in love and war, and Billy knows it well.





	if he ain't got nobody

**Author's Note:**

> “A guy needs somebody―to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. Don't make no difference who the guy is, long's he's with you. I tell ya, I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick.”  
\- John Steinbeck, _Of Mice and Men._

The expanse of the night sky was overwhelming, and it was quiet out - too quiet, if one was willing to indulge a cliché. You got used to being on edge, so much so that your nerves fluttered in the most unexpected of places - whether in the velvet sprawl of the dead of night in the exact center of the desert, or walking down the block hearing the commonplace yell of someone selling hot dogs or a coat full of bootleg DVDs.

Billy supposed it was an inherited and unavoidable side effect of whatever came to you in the years of sweating, screaming through a mouthful of grit, trying to help some buddy hold his guts in his shrapnel-dissected abdomen until - _maybe _\- a medic showed up.

His sleep had been inconsistent at best, always had been - maybe a side effect of living in boys' homes, where you never knew who was in the bunk bed underneath you. Billy had spent years waiting for a dirty fistful of callused fingers to slither up over the edge of his bed, for some kid who'd had it worse than he did to choke the life out of him, to beat his face into hamburger.

Sleeping with a hair trigger worked well for the Marines. He should've written it in on his enlistment papers.

Inconsistency seemed to follow him into the fine sands of the desert, only to amplify and squash his comfortable six hours from his every night. There were times Billy didn't sleep at all these days, and mornings he forced himself through the day even when the fatigue of drifting off a few hours sometime in the night followed him into the waking hours. It was hard to shake off the tiredness, but if he didn't, there was a sure threat that men could die, even if he didn't happen to be one of the doomed that particular day.

Deployment coffee was shit, unless you could choke down enough of it. Billy took what he could get - always had, probably always would. It was another side effect of childhood, and he suspected maybe everyone had some instinct that haunted them.

There was something to be said for being the only one awake in the night, even when Billy found himself desperate and clawing for sleep. In the dead of night he didn't have to pretend to smile, to do the dance of other men who hadn't grown up as offal.

It was when he did his best reading, any scrap of something that was mailed to a guy by his wife or another well-meaning relative - a father, maybe a cousin. He'd devour any borrowed tome, even the heavy ones guys handed off in an effort not to have to schlep around a few thousand pages in a rucksack. Tonight was a slim volume - Of Mice and Men, all small type that seemed bleak even in its brevity.

It was hard to read with a flashlight, a lot of back and forth from hand to hand, and tonight he dropped his in an attempt to turn the page. It landed with a muffled thud in the sand beneath him. There was something to be said for overhead lighting - he'd never known how much he'd miss it.

"Can't sleep?" The voice behind him was a low, familiar grumble, and Billy found himself fleetingly proud of himself for not betraying so much as a flinch. It was important to show you were never scared.

Frank approached and settled beside him in the sand. It made Billy sit up a little straighter.

"Just enjoying the fresh air," Billy half-lied, knowing full well he was sidestepping the question. "Come to share?"

"Had to piss," Frank explained offhandedly, his eyes pointed upward to the stars. "Was sleeping like a rock though."

Billy idly ruffled the edges of the pages of his now-closed book, the sound unexpected and loud in the stillness of the night. "'least that makes one of us." It was honest, and Billy was surprised to hear himself say it out loud. Frank always seemed to have that effect on him. "When I get home I'm buying a fat sack of Ambien and eating a handful." It was a joke that carried some truth of past consideration.

"Somebody I ought to tell about that death wish of yours, Russo?" Frank observed dryly. Billy gave a dismissive shrug and offered no further commentary. They sat in a companionable silence, though Billy could feel its weight, heavy down to his toes and the soles of his boots. His book had gone long forgotten.

The truth of it was that kicking and gouging in mud and blood and sand alongside Frank had taken its toll on him, started sinking its claws in the first time Frank hoisted him up to shimmy over a wall during a drill when he thought his legs would give way beneath him. Sometimes he considered that he might remember the feeling of the weighty clap of Frank's hand between his shoulder blades when they met on the other side.

So much had transpired since then - so much _waste_ and gore, men bloodied and writhing with screams ripped from them without a second thought. Billy hadn't even noticed until death became a second language that sometimes felt uncomfortably close to a native tongue. There was little to gain from agonizing over it, at least out loud. There were times when two showers weren't enough - the first to get some other guy's guts off of you, the second to try and scrub away that remaining phantom smell of copper in the middle of the night when you swore you could still feel it clinging to you.

There was some kind of inevitability to it, Billy thought when he was willing to indulge himself in nostalgia-warped self pity - being clapped on the back and called _brother_ by someone who'd seen as much as you, who would go home as fractured beneath the surface as you were. Billy was used to a façade, the routine of playacting as someone who let loneliness roll off of him like water on a duck's back. If he loved Frank, he gave no outward indication of it, carried it stitched into the inside sleeve jacked of his fatigues, where it was as safe as a thing like _that_ could be.

It was certainly a danger to get close, or allow someone to do it for you.

Maybe Frank was oblivious to it, somehow couldn't feel that sharp pull of _want_ rolling off of Billy in the cot next to him, in the waning hours of the late night when, predictably, sleep would not come to him.

It was weak to want, to indulge sentimentality, and Billy had learned it the first time he cried when his first and only boys' home best friend was adopted - Alex Walsh waving from the back of a station wagon with brand new parents and probably a fucking puppy waiting at home. The house mother had told him something vague and condescending, advice about being a man or chinning up or something reflective of _that's life in the big city_. New parents and a puppy never found Billy. By the age of fifteen the hope of it had left him, nothing left to do but methodically consider what he could make of himself.

He'd long directed his memory away from that of Alex Walsh on that long ride to suburbia, had forgotten it until the night of Frank's bachelor party when his throat was too closed by a strange sense of morose to make a toast over the shitty Vegas bombs the feather boa'ed waitress had given them for free when Frank was too drunk to slur anything but _I'm getting fuckin' married_ around a fat cigar someone had put in his hand against better judgment.

It didn't occur to Billy to wonder why something bleak had settled in the pit of his stomach - it was too easy to put a name to it that Billy could scarcely imagine dwelling on it. It was easy to be replaced, or at least it always had been for him.

Billy had known it was coming, could see it in the way that Frank had spoken about Maria since the first time he swooned over some nameless woman with dark hair and an airy sundress he'd met in the park. He'd become perceptive out of necessity, forced himself to the first time any older man's eyes had lingered on him a little too long.

That night he'd feigned a drunkenness that had rendered him sloppy, incoherent, in an effort to avoid proclaiming his delight about his brother finding who Frank messily declared a fucking _soulmate_ with most of the rest of a mouthful of whiskey and a quick slap to the bar. It was borne of cowardice that Billy could've readily admitted to if a sympathetic ear had been around. _Poor fuckin' Bill_, Frank had laughed, pitying Billy for being rendered incapable of speaking by the drink, his own perception too impaired to notice. He'd placed a half-drooled kiss to Billy's temple, arm slung heavy around his shoulder.

It was all so stupid.

Afterward, he'd met a pretty girl in the bar of his hotel around the corner, all long legs and blonde hair, and he'd fucked her. He'd fucked her to get the fleeting touch of Frank's graceless mouth off of his skin. She was gorgeous in the way that a transplant from some faraway sun-kissed state with cornfields always seemed to be, and her hands were so soft. Maybe he could've loved someone like that if he hadn't learned early on that love came with barbs that made it impossible to pick up. Her hands were too soft, really. Neither of them entertained the idea of offering more than a _that was fun_, and neither of them promised to call, to _do this again sometime_. It was easier that way.

Here in the sand, Frank stretched his arms in front of him, circling his wrists with an almost comically large yawn.

"Going back to bed," he said, unbothered by the fact that Billy now bordered on sulking out underneath the night sky. "Maybe you oughtta think about doing the same."

"Sure," Billy told him dismissively, though somewhere deep down Billy knew Frank was well aware that it was futile.

"Maybe you need to try some of that deep breathing shit they talk about," Frank added as he turned his back. "Count sheep. Smell some lavender." It was a half-joke that Billy offered a hollow laugh as exchange for. It was best to push through it, he thought, dragged over sandpaper in the morning over breakfast with maybe an hour or two of sleep under his belt.

Tiredness never seemed to worsen his aim.

-

It was easier when he'd finally crawled out of the desert and back home, across oceans Billy had never even imagined looking out over as a kid. It was especially easier to come home and spin your own upward mobility out of thin air - a boy made of rags who no longer had to dress in them. It was easier to buy yourself some peace of mind to distract yourself from so many dragging, beige months spend hunkered in the sand next to your brother - slash - best friend - slash blind spot. Sometimes Billy wondered if he could ever pay enough not to ache.

He could feel a staggering dread every time Frank and Maria backed him into a corner with no other option but to join them at home for a generous, overstuffed dinner with the kids. It wasn't for lack of Billy trying to refuse, to be evasive with the excuse of _so busy these days, it's crazy, sorry_. They would pick the bones of his calendar until there was nothing left to do but suck it up and agree.

Billy could feel a hard stone in the pit of his stomach for the entirety of each dinner, could feel nothing but an inward, withering disdain when Maria would ask him if he was seeing anybody _nice_, as if there were some kind of virtue in someone being _nice_ enough to be compatible with someone who'd dragged himself through the nightmarish maze of explosions and blood he'd both observed and contributed to.

What did _nice_ have to do with anything anymore?

He was bold, though not without tact, able to restrain himself from getting close and personal into Maria's face, to tell her, _I spent every deployment wanting your husband to pin me down on my back and take what he wanted _just to see what her expression might betray. He wondered similarly if such a spit-out phrase would bring any look to Frank's face, the way one might recoil if a stray dog was to nip at him.

When he answered with a sheepish _no_, the expression of blind sympathy on Maria's face made him feel sick.

"Just hold out, Billy - there's a lid for every pot, and you happen to be a very nice pot," she soothed. He supposed she was trying to be kind without knowing it had put a hot knife into him, right in the guts.

Frank looked up from his plate with a wry, teasing smile that Billy wanted to roughly kiss off of his face before he could chime in, but it was to no avail.

"And once you find someone who'll put up with all your BS, don't let her go." It nearly repulsed Billy to hear Frank censor himself over his family dinner table for the sake of the children, namely because he'd heard Frank grit out _fuck_ in a moment of annoyance or distress so many times that it had woven its way into his fantasies, wondering in his most secret moments if he'd ever have the opportunity to wring it out himself. "They get intimidated that you're prettier than them anyway."

The tiny part of him that ached for approval twisted, making heat flare up in his belly, but at least he kept it off of his cheeks. Never let them see you sweat.

"I get no complaints," Billy countered, forcing his voice to take on a wry note to betray the fact that he felt exposed, like a moth pinned to poster board and displayed in a biology lab.

"Besides, you're on your way to being rich," Frank continued. It was true. Anvil was on the rise, even though each zero added to Billy's bank ledger made him feel a hollow sense of pride that made no dent in keeping him warm at night. Billy shrugged at that, knowing that someone was supposed to be modest when his or her building fortune came up in conversation - even with a best friend - and letting that mask settle on his face without commentary.

Suddenly the layers of pasta felt too heavy where it had settled in his belly, and he squirmed a little in his seat, wanting to escape.

"It'll be your time soon, Billy," Maria offered, clearly intending to soothe as she wrongly assumed the squirm in his seat was borne out of humility over his rising stock. She linked her fingers with Frank's atop the floral tablecloth, and Billy had a quick flash of himself slamming the blade on the bread knife through their woven flesh and tendons. Instead, he offered a thin, pinched smile.

If Frank sensed his discomfort, he offered no indication, knowing it was useless to poke at Billy to get him to spill his guts. The kids chattered aimlessly about a new kite or some other shit that held no interest for Billy, but he was thankful for the diversion.

After dinner and a glass of wine with dessert, Billy finally deemed it socially acceptable to excuse himself. He'd never been more glad to escape anything in his life, even a firefight, or a narrowly missed IED that exploded on the humvee behind him in the convoy. At least those things were typical in violence.

Frank followed him to the door, studying his expression as though it had occurred to him for the first time that something in Billy was simmering. He wondered what Frank assumed it was, but made no move to speak.

"Y'know, you don't have to hide until I drag you kicking and screaming out of your fancy loft," Frank said, good natured but firm. His smile looked crooked, at ease, and Billy loved the idea of being looked at fondly by someone who didn't wonder if he'd come back changed by all that sand. It would've been so easy to brush his mouth across those crooked, dry lips, and maybe he could've in another world where he hadn't allowed himself to languish in cowardice until it was too late.

The realization was nauseating.

"What fun would that be, if I didn't make you work for it, Castle?" It was easy to play cocky, hard to get, even. "Might start taking old Billy for granted." He wondered if a couple of glasses of wine had made him bolder.

Suddenly the look on Frank's face shifted into earnestness. "You know I wouldn't," he objected, suddenly serious when Billy hadn't intended for it as a result. "You're my brother." Frank had poured himself a finger of whiskey and had almost offered one to Billy before he'd announced his imminent departure. Frank had gotten lighter in weight since he'd settled down. Billy had moved oppositely.

"Of course," Billy agreed. He made no effort to return the sentiment, knowing Frank would chalk it up to the emotional constipation he ribbed Billy about on more than one occasion. It seemed to be permission for Frank to hug him, clapping a hand on his back as their shoulders bumped together.

Billy thanked God that he had the discipline not to linger and savor the warmth before stepping out into the night air.

-

Caroline, if that even was her real name, was soft in all the right places - hips, chest, and voice, mainly - and Billy was thankful he had the resources to track down and pay for the perfect opposite of what he was tired of being followed by. She was discreet, and kind when she needed to be. She smelled like cinnamon and sandalwood - as rich as he felt. She was so much more than Billy had dreamed of when he fumbled with girls with gapped teeth and bottle-blonde hair washed with two dollar bottles of Suave in the backseats of borrowed cars growing up.

It was a pity such things had to be made possible by almost-clinical transactions, but it was worth it in its convenience.

Her legs were long, and Billy enjoyed the way that her silk dressing gown seemed to glide over them. Her hair hung in chestnut curls down to the tops of her breasts, clad in unpretentious navy blue lace. She was beautiful, and made no move to touch him yet other than to let one hand settle on his thigh - a few points of heat through the fine weave of his trousers.

"Long day?" she asked, well aware by now that Billy often surfaced when he needed an outlet that the gym or a deluge of fine liquor just couldn't take care of. Billy was thankful that he'd called her when he arrived home from Frank and Maria's the night before, and more thankful still that he had enough strength not to combust until Caroline was free. He nodded, looking down at his lap with an uncharacteristic lack of poise.

It made him feel small to admit he needed this - an itch he couldn't quite scratch with a woman in a cocktail dress he could charm into his bed. There was a level of effort required to appear vulnerable, and it was one he had long before shut away and avoided dealing with now.

"Well, you know you don't have to worry now," she murmured, carding her short nails through the well-maintained hair at Billy's temple. "Let me." He kept his eyes trained on his lap, trying to let himself enjoy the way Caroline's fingers felt in his hair. He swallowed the lump in his throat that had built up as he wished they were rougher and poised to pull at him. "What do you want to do tonight?"

It was a long, tangled list, one with a dozen or so things that Billy knew he couldn't get from this beautiful woman who wasn't afraid of his sharp edges and the spaces underneath them that held almost nothing he wanted to or could expose.

"I - " he started before finding himself helpless. He'd been coming to Caroline's apartment for months now - understated and modest, the complete opposite of what you might expect finding a woman like this in the corners of the internet or word of kiss bruised mouth. It had disgusted him at first, and he hadn't been able to shake it - the son of a whore finding refuge in the arms of one. He could barely look at himself sometimes if he thought about it too much.

"Let me take care of you," Caroline suggested, knowing that words weren't finding Billy easily tonight. She knew enough to know what he liked, and Billy found himself uncomfortable with just how well she knew him and wanted to help with the parts of him that made him feel ugly and twisted inside.

She slid one hand down a few inches of Billy's inseam, and he fought down the instinct to shake in his seat on the edge of her bed in the dim light.

"Kiss me?" he blurted out, something wrenched out of him that he had until now kept at bay. There was something that felt foreign and scary about Caroline's painted lips - a level of intimacy he never expected to allow in such a space. She was kind, and so very soft. Maybe it would feel good to permit such a softness to touch him even when he'd done so little to deserve it up until now, and maybe he never would do more.

Caroline smiled as though she had taken a small comfort in the fact that she'd chipped down a few bricks in the walls that Billy had put up out of decades of necessity. She laid a gentle hand at the fine curve of Billy's jaw, studying his expression as though meeting a new person for the first time. Maybe that's how things like this were supposed to be every time. She forced their eyes to meet, and Billy felt sick.

Their lips met, initiated by Caroline, and Billy let himself be kissed with a sweetness he'd never expected to get from someone who was arguably working for him. Her mouth was insistent and self-assured, and for a moment Billy didn't notice the feeling of her lipstick smearing against his own lips until he could taste it - artificial and matte and jarring.

He allowed his eyes to drift closed, almost as though in pain.

"You're all right, Billy," she soothed, sensing something had changed. Caroline was good at allowing Billy to be rough, to take out whatever aggressions the days or weeks or months or years had instilled in him. She never complained, never protested, and always seemed eager to please him - a consummate professional, and one who knew the dark parts of him well without concrete explanation. She always seemed to want more, even if it was an illusion.

Billy allowed her to handily undo his tie, to pick open the buttons trailing down his shirtfront with her hand following underneath the parted layers. His breath came in sharp huffs through his nose as she pulled away to let her mouth meander down his neck and throat. It felt a little like suffocating in his own blood. He'd watched enough men do it to make an educated guess.

His shirt was opened now, exposing his chest to the dimmed light and warm air. Caroline always had candles with a warm, spicy scent, and Billy let himself feel comforted by the smell that was by now familiar. She leaned down and kissed at his pebbling nipple as she undid his belt with an ease that came from practice that ought to have horrified him outside of this room.

Her mouth was warm in all of the places that it met him, and it felt like being burned for a split second each time her lips moved against his skin. They were too soft to fool him into thinking one day he might've woken up lucky enough to get what he'd wanted for years, maybe since the first day a strong jaw and a battered nose had come into his orbit.

Caroline freed his erection from his pants and the thin, soft fabric of his underwear and wasted no time tonguing patiently at the head of his cock. Billy let out a sharp exhale through his nose, like it had been punched out of him with the point of a knife. He could feel the wet point of her tongue circling his tip, spreading wetness around. He tried not to whimper - it would've been undignified in a way he couldn't spare, not right now, not ever - but failed before he could stop himself. There was a swelling in his chest that made him feel ill, in perfect contrast to the way her mouth felt so alive and beautiful around him.

"God," he whispered, almost reverently, holding himself up on his elbows as she worked. He raised his hand to his mouth to sink his teeth into his knuckles to avoid further sounds to escape him, secretly hoping he might draw blood in a way he could lie and attribute to being lost in his pleasure instead of drowning in whatever _this_ _shit_ kicking around in his head was.

She was so good to him he kept his fingers out of her hair the way he might normally, figuring she needed more respect this time for putting up with the wobbling load of emotion he unwillingly found pressing down on his shoulders. Billy liked to pretend she recognized and appreciated the gesture based on the way she hummed with quiet enthusiasm around the hard mouthful of him, but reminded himself this was probably more routine than he'd like to admit to himself.

There was heat pooling deep within him, swirling and building faster than he could imagine, especially as he imagined the feel of strong fingers digging ten dappled fingerprints into the skin of his hips where he was held in place to keep from bucking. It would feel so good paired with a blunt, fleeting scrape of teeth up the length of him, and he bit harder into his knuckles in search of some type of similar sensation.

Instead, Caroline ran a soothing hand down his flank, still clothed in his fine dress pants even if the most important part of him was bared to her. He was glad his eyes were closed as it occurred to him that this woman knew all about what he carried, even if the names and dates were blank and ripe for suggestion that she would have the abundance of tact to avoid in a way that not just any woman would be able to allow him. It was safer this way.

It felt masochistic to imagine the things Frank might say if he had Billy here at his mercy, crouched between Billy's clothed thighs with his hot, wet mouth around Billy's cock. He flushed all over to imagine it. _That's it, sweetheart - let me hear you._ Billy's imagination could be a terrible, terrible thing that had never served him, not even as a child when it would wander to a nameless, faceless family and puppy and two car garage that he eventually stopped hoping would wait for him somewhere.

Billy realized he was shaking all over.

"That's it," Caroline whispered, having the decency only to pull away for a brief exhalation of encouragement, knowing of Billy's propensity to sink into his head with his thoughts outside of this room, this block, this street, and back into what might've been out there in the desert. It had all been such a waste on so many levels. The most melodramatic part of him wished he hadn't come home and had instead been left to wander in the dunes.

The tension didn't stop and only beat harder and harder in his gut when she took him back into his mouth, and it made his hips buck involuntarily into the hot, wet space of her mouth. He was tired, suddenly, so tired of it all that it felt futile to try to persist.

"I'm going to come," he sputtered out, choking on the words like he would if he were drowning.

"I want you to," Caroline encouraged, then smiling plaintively again around the length of him as she swallowed him down. She was so good it hurt him, knowing that affection was lost of a person like him - a shell borne of necessity and bedecked in fine suits and penthouses now, instead of hand me down clothes and scraped knees that still attracted unwanted gazes. She slid her hand up underneath his shirt and across the lean, well-maintained plane of his stomach, and Billy let out a pained groan, coming hard and unexpectedly like a freight train on rickety tracks.

Despite his ever-vigilance in protecting himself for all of these years, Billy slumped backwards here on the bed, falling off of his sore elbows to the flat of his back. There was a prickle under his eyelids and in his sinuses, and Billy squeezed his eyes shut and steepled his index fingers on either side of the bridge of his nose and prayed it would stay at bay until he could excuse himself, if not longer. Caroline had excused herself to tidy up, and perhaps in small part to let Billy regroup his dignity. He trembled, hurting more in the afterglow than normal this time.

When she returned, she settled on the bed next to him, cleaning him patiently and tucking him back into all of his clothing until it was as though nothing had happened at all. She gently arranged his hair now, knowing Billy cared how he looked even when he felt that his insides were decaying at an alarming rate. When she was finished, Caroline pressed a gentle, fleeting kiss in the center of Billy's forehead, taking care to pat away the faint smudge her lipstick left in its wake.

She leaned away from him on the bed as she watched Billy struggle to slow his breath.

"I wonder if therapy is cheaper than me," she mused, and Billy supposed he ought to appreciate her ability to be forthcoming and beautiful at the same time, in a way he rarely expected women to be these days. His respect was bare enough to be more than begrudging.

"Can't fuck your therapist," he offered crudely, wincing inwardly at what it meant about both her and him.

If she was offended, Caroline offered no indication. "I'm sure there's something in their Code of Ethics about that," she agreed, arching a meticulously penciled eyebrow. She paused. "Not that I don't mind you coming by when you need me, but I don't have a degree in that sort of thing," she offered pointedly. "It couldn't hurt to spend a couple evenings a week with both of us." Billy wondered if she delicately suggested this type of thing to most of her clients, even the regulars she seemed to tolerate easily. "You know I like you, Russo," she added, in the way that a companionable - though ultimately detached - bartender would, before shrugging one shoulder that was bare where her robe had drifted down. "But what do I know?"

Her few sentences had jabbed a little too close to him, into the tender parts of him that his orgasm had peeled the armor away from for the moment. Half of his brain blanched at the vulnerability.

"You know a thing or two," he conceded, knowing he'd deliberately avoid acting on her advice. "More than just a pretty face, right?"

Billy always paid in cash. It was neater to put bills down on a bedroom vanity table and walk out. He'd always appreciated the opportunity for a clean break.

His stomach ached as he began the chilly walk home, perhaps from an abstract emptiness that had developed in basic training and had only deepened when he'd returned home, no longer needed when he'd been replaced by a cheerful sundress and a houseful of kids whose father could never bear to burden with descriptions of entrails ripped free from tenuously-containing flesh by shrapnel and left to glisten morbidly in the sand and the burning whip of the wind.

There was no one waiting at home from Billy, not really, other than his withered, helpless mother in some hospital bed he'd paid for out of a sneering sense of obligation and pitying disgust. Perhaps it was easier that way - the world and its had never shielded Billy from anything, and certainly never coddled, and now he could return the favor.

If there were things that truly were fair in love and war, he'd never received the intel.

He'd missed the cold air stateside. It felt good on his cheeks in the dark. He didn't expect to sleep tonight. Some things you didn't just leave behind across the sea.

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a while since I dipped my toe in this fandom, but it seems I can't leave angsty Billy Russo alone...  
Thank you so much for reading!


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